WEST BANK (Dispatches) – Newly declassified data demonstrate how the Zionist regime backed the Myanmar army through various repressive means, enabling it to commit atrocities against dissidents as well as minority groups such as Rohingya Muslims.
Some 25,000 pages of the Zionist regime’s foreign ministry documents have been recently declassified which show deep military ties between the occupying regime and Burma (which later changed its name to Myanmar) from the 1950s until the beginning of the 1980s.
According to a Thursday report by Haaretz, the documents show the Zionist regime viewed, in the vicious civil war that raged there, the military junta and the army’s corruption and violence, both a diplomatic opportunity for the regime and a business opportunity for the occupying regime’s troops and the military industries.
Citing the documents, the report notes that the occupying regime has played a key role in the establishment of the Asian country’s army, which has ruled first Burma, then Myanmar, with lethal cruelty for most of the country’s existence.
“Israel assisted the army in reorganizing as a modern force, armed and trained it, and contributed dramatically to building its might and entrenching its hold as the most powerful element in the country. That power initially enabled the army to manage the country from behind the scenes, and afterward to remove the civilian leadership and forge a variety of different military regimes,” reads the report.
The documents reveal that one of the main aims of the regime was to win Burmese support in international forums in exchange for its arms support.
According to the report, the Zionist regime perceived the deadly civil war in Burma in the 1950s as a “golden opportunity” for increasing its arms sales to Burma.
Meanwhile, Burma was also inspired by the regime’s occupation of Palestinian lands and building illegal settlements as they tried to settle military personnel in regions inhabited by rebellious ethnic minorities, in the style of the IDF’s Nahal Brigade outposts.
The documents show that despite being aware of widespread internal oppression in the Asian country, including an attempt to undertake ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minority, the Zionist regime continued to offer Burma security services.
“We are interested in establishing a connection between our Mossad and the Burmese Mossad,” Kalman Anner, the then director of the Asia Desk wrote in January 1982 after the Zionist regime saw the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people as an opportunity.